Gaze
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Posted - 2003.06.21 16:00:00 -
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The changes are as follows:
A button has been added to the main corporation window which allows a corporation to specify names for it's seven "divisions". The term division is used somewhat loosely here as players are not actually in divisions at all but can have security rights within divisions, and thus by assosciation they can "be" in more than one division. The division names are used for the corporation hangars, if the name is set blank the name defaults to something like 1st Division, 2nd Division etc.
The "Market" hangar, and the "Factory" hangar have been turned into divisional hangars. The security roles of corporation members that are Accountants, Factory Managers have been updated respectibly so that they can access what they can before. Players with the role Accountant will get full access to the hangar that used to be the Market hangar (same as they had before). Players with the role Factory Manager will get view access to the hangar that was the Factory hangar, and players with the grantable role Factory Manager get view and take rights to that hangar.
Now that we have these seven divisions you may be thinking, what else changed? Well the short and tall of it is that there is a richer role based security paradigm in use for the corporation hangar, and also the roles have been extended for use with the corporation wallet (this still has to be implemented, the roles are there for the wallet but as yet they do nothing).
In short there are 28 new roles and this made the dialog for viewing and editing corporation members roles somewhat large. This dialog has been reimplemented. The roles are now grouped under seperate tabs and listed in a scrollable window, so adding more roles in the future should not be a problem. The dialog also displays the picture of the corporation member and their name and title in big letters at the top of the dialog, so there can be no mistake in assigning roles to the wrong character as you can very clearly see which characters details are being viewed or edited when the dialog is open.
As we can now edit these roles for "Can Take" and "Can Query" there is the obvious update to the corporation hangar that implements these. A player that has Can Take rights to a given hangar can take items from that hangar. A player that has has Can Query rights to a given hangar can see what is in the hangar. Of course it is possible to give a player Can Take and not Can Query, this is perhapse wanted in one possible situation, and that is manufacturing (this combination could be used so that the installer of a production job would have the rights to specify a the hangar that the resources for the bill of materials (item recipie as some people call it) come from, whereby the player would be able to have the factory take the materials required by the bill of requirements but the player themself would not be able to take them as they would not be able to see what is in that actual hangar. Yes this is somewhat convoluted and perhapse confusing but it is perfectly valid and probably some corporations will even use this combination).
Well now I suppose it is fairly obvious that I have also updated factories and research facilities as well for these changes. The best way to see these changes is to create and run a production job for a corporation. The first change that you will notice is that the series of popup windows asking you for the job details has now gone. This has been replaced by a new wizard style dialog that walks you through the process of creating the new production job. What exactly does this entail? Well firstly the activity is selected (if appropriate ie not in a factory). The next step is selecting the item to install for the production job, this starts of by allowing the player to select the hangar that they want to install from (if this is a coproration job) and then displaying the contents of the item so that an item can be selected for installation. Once an item has been selected the player can click Next and go to the next step. If this is a corporate job then they need to specify the hangar where the resources come from and then the hangar where the output goes to. After this they are asked how many production runs they wish to order for the job, and then after that they are displayed a summary of the data that they entered. If they want to change some detail they can simply hit the Back button untill they get to the page in the wizard dialog in question and change the detail and then carry on.
After the job has been installed the new UI for the factory / research facility appears..... The viewer of the running production job can now see more information than they could before and it is orgaized in seperate tab views. It is probably best if you simply check this out to see the changes.
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